Glory for Sale: Fans, Dollars and the New NFL

Glory      

for

Sale

FANS, DOLLARS AND THE NEW NFL

by Jon Morgan

Baltimore MD

Copyright 1997 by Bancroft Press

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote passages in a review.

Published by Bancroft Press

P.O. Box 65360, Baltimore, MD 21209. (410) 358-0658.

ISBN 978-1-61088-017-6

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 97-73064

Printed in the United States of America

First edition

Designed by Melinda Russell, Bancroft Press

Distributed to the trade by National Book Network, Lanham, MD

For Carol Frigo, my wife and best friend.

And our daughters, Hannah, Allison and Rachel.

It’s OK to come back into the basement now, girls.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe thanks to more people than I can name, but here are a few: My structural editor, Ann Sjoerdsma, who skillfully, patiently, and even cheerfully crafted a book out of 130,000 stray words. And my publisher/editor, Bruce Bortz, who not only conceived the idea of this book but took a gamble on me. Also, my bosses at The Sun, Jack Gibbons and Molly Dunham Glassman, for giving me the best job in journalism.

Among those generous with their time, recollections or encouragement were Herb Belgrad, James Biggar, Ordell Braase, James Considine, Bruce Gaines, Tony Grossi, Timothy Heider, Arthur Hirsch, Mike Klingaman, Stephen Koff, Robert Leffler, Nancy Lesic, Laura Lippman, Laura Martinez Massie, Creighton Miller, Mike Preston, Michael D. Roberts, Jeff Schudel, Matthew Tanner, Jack Torry, Tom Waldron and John Ziemann.

Of course, the work is my own and I take responsibility for any errors or omissions.

CONTENTS

Foreword: The American Dream

Prologue: In Charm City

PART 1 — THE GAME OR THE MONEY?

The Upstart League

That Old Colt Fever

The Legend of Paul, Jim, and Art

Modell’s Dynasty

The Irsay Watch

PART 2 — ADAPTING TO CHANGE

Modell Flunks Stadium Economics

Baltimore Strikes Back

The League Expands

A Sun-Belt Strategy

Cleveland and the Jake

A Stadium Hangover

PART 3 — BROWNS UP FOR GRABS

Modell Drops the Bomb

Darth Vader

The Deal

The Ravens Kick Off

Afterword: What Should We Do?

APPENDICES:

Footnotes

Timeline

Graphic: Fans, Dollars and the New NFL

Graphic: Franchise Flight

Index

FOREWORD BY TIM GREEN

The American Dream

Those of us who played in the NFL can always recall at least one moment when we looked up from the grass, glazed in sweat, head pounding in the heat, to see the visage of our team’s owner contentedly looking on. At that moment, we wondered what it would be like to own a team. Most knew that a drive for money burned in our core and that owners had more of it than any of us.

Oh, I know, some players like to reminisce about the old days when athletes played for the love of the game. But that’s like pining for your old girlfriend: you always remember her better than she really was. I don’t know if any NFL players ever really played just for the love of the game, but I do know this: No sane person would ever do the things you have to do to yourself, physically, mentally, and emotionally, in order to play in today’s NFL if someone wasn’t dangling a big bag of cash in front of them. No, money is at the bottom of it all. Players know the score; it’s a multibillion dollar business. And they want their cut.

One thing I never did as a player was think about owners in the human sense. To me, they were insulated, pampered people — the idle rich, who were sponging off of our bone-jarring efforts. Of course, like most of the rest of us, they are still human beings who live out their lives, part tragedy, part comedy. Granted, some of them are silver-spooners, and their teams are playthings. Others are entrepreneurs who made fortunes in oil or computers or shoes, men who’ve crammed their office walls with endless power photos, honors and awards and are now proud possessors of the biggest, best, most testosterone-induced trophy of them all: an NFL team. But even these men eat and sleep and breathe. They know, like us, the sting of failure and the charge of success. A few, especially the NFL old-timers, have more in common with the rest of us than we ever suspected.

In Glory for Sale, we begin to understand fully why Art Modell, one of those old-timers, moved his venerated NFL franchise out of Cleveland. For the first time, in a public forum, we see Modell as a human being. We learn that his very presence in the league was the result of an outrageous speculation, an all-or-nothing gamble decades ago that just happened to pay off. We also learn that NFL franchises, back in the days before football was king, were not unlike today’s professional lacrosse teams. Which of us would risk everything we had on one of those franchises? That is what Modell did. There were few others like him who were willing to gamble, but those who played won big. NFL franchises are now not only worth close to $300 million apiece, but they give their owners a power and a prestige worth twice that. Football has become our national religion, and NFL owners are the druids. Men of business, men of state, men of war: All are inexorably drawn toward the people who own and control these teams.

Yet, those owners are no more immune to greed and incompetence and chicanery and worry than the rest of us. What happened to Art Modell has happened to each of us at some time or other. The move from Cleveland, I contend, happened to him more than it happened to even the most stalwart of Browns fans. Haven’t we all trusted someone only to discover later that we were deceived, and what’s worse, that the deceiver is pointing the finger of blame at us? Haven’t most of us entered into an agreement with a contractor or a car salesman only to later find that they not only failed to live up to their end of the bargain, but never intended to do so in the first place?

Make no mistake, this book does not exonerate Art Modell. It takes pointed note of his hypocrisy. What Glory for Sale does is humanize Modell. It leaves us with the realization that, were we in this man’s shoes, we’d have done the very same thing. It’s all well and good for any of us (especially our slippery politicians) to stand back and cry foul at Modell’s apostasy. It’s certainly possible to see him as an elitist owner and power monger, and it’s just as possible to give him no pity because his type, which has everything, is held to a higher standard than everyone else. Yet no man felt more ache in his craw during this debacle than Modell himself. The fans lost their team, but only for a short time.

Modell lost a part of his life. He built that team. He paid its prodigious bills. He leveraged everything he had to hang onto it. Fans may have paid their $25 for a ticket and worn the team colors, but I dare say they got their money’s worth in entertainment and then some. From my experience as an opposing player, I know what the energy was like in Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium. I felt those Dawg Pound biscuits raining down on my helmet. I heard those gut-rending cheers when the Browns scored and when they won. That is what fans paid for; that is what they got. They never paid to have Art Modell watch the team he gambled on so many years ago whisked out the window to creditors in a bankruptcy court. They never paid him to flush down the drain the legacy he created for his children and grandchildren. Those were rights they didn’t earn. The name and colors and records of their Browns, yes, those things belong to Cleveland and its fans. But no more.

When you read this book, you too will realize that Art Modell did exactly what you would have done. He saved himself and his family, while leaving the thing which was most important (the team name and colors) to the community he loved, the community that vilified him nonetheless. This was not a man who betrayed a train-load of children to the Nazi’s. The only thing Modell did was create a temporary hiatus for Browns football in Cleveland. Though my life has orbited this game, I believe that such a development is disconcerting at best, and certainly not criminal. Cleveland Browns football will live on, as it should. People must realize that they were whipped into a frenzy by the very politicians who made it impossible for Modell to stay.

You are about to learn what happened in those back rooms of power over the years, the events that made Modell’s move from Cleveland inevitable. For the first time, you will be privy to all the political shenanigans, false promises and shady deals you always suspected were occurring. Jon Morgan adeptly takes you into the engine of the NFL. What you’ll find there are the same machinations that turn the wheels of our politics, our corporations, our world of entertainment and our very lives. What you’ll see are people just like you. We all want to get ahead, to make it big. When you subscribe to the American dream, there’s no sense blaming Art Modell for doing the same.

PROLOGUE

In Charm City

Art Modell didn’t look like a man who had just added $75 million to his fortune.

Slumped in a chair, his arms tightly across his bulging middle, the white-haired owner of the Cleveland Browns looked tired and old, every bit of his 70 years. His face was worn and puffy from many sleepless nights.

Age had long ago rounded Modell’s features and broadened his once sturdy, athletic build. But it had left him with an expression of perpetual bemusement — the cocked grin of a kindly uncle who always seems on the verge of cracking a joke.

Not today. Not on Nov. 6, 1995.

For most of the spectators waiting to hear Modell speak in a downtown Baltimore parking lot, the moment was one of celebration; Modell was bringing the National Football League back to the city. His fabled Browns were headed for the Colts’ Memorial Stadium where they’d play until the opening of their own new, state-of-the-art stadium in the fall of 1998.

For Baltimoreans, it had been 12 painful years since their beloved Colts had slipped out of town. The team had loaded its gear into green and yellow Mayflower vans bound for Indianapolis on a snowy March 1984 night. Not even the mayor, who had worked so hard to keep the gloried franchise, was notified of the move.

But that was ancient history now. For today, in a sundrenched, noon photo opportunity, Art Modell was announcing the Browns’ arrival. Ten television stations — four from Baltimore and six from Cleveland — were there to record the event. Sports network ESPN was beaming it live to cable watchers nationwide. Once again, there would be NFL football in Charm City, the popular nickname for Maryland’s largest city.

Though news reports had predicted the announcement days before, Maryland officials and Modell had withheld public confirmation until today, until they could hold this celebration on the spot where the new stadium would be built. Maryland Governor Parris Glendening and Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke had already called their Ohio counterparts to tell them the news. At 4 a.m., local newsrooms had received faxes announcing Football is coming back to Baltimore! but not mentioning the team they had all reported already.

About 100 invited guests were seated in folding chairs in front of a makeshift stage, built a few feet above a parking lot serving baseball’s Oriole Park at Camden Yards. Potted plants lined the gray and dark brown dais. Gray upholstered chairs with sturdy, dark wooden legs were neatly arranged. The dais, the furniture, the dark suits on the speakers — all lent the scene the look of an outdoor, corporate board meeting.

In fact, this was the ultimate board meeting: a jarring collision of sport and business. One of the most avidly supported franchises in sports was jilting its fans in favor of the profit potential of a new stadium and the corporate dollars it would attract.

Baltimore, long the prototypical victim of the NFL, was now a plunderer. But among the city’s celebrants, there was little sign of irony or remorse. The gubernatorial seal of Maryland, with its heraldic crest, was hung on the podium, and the yellow and black flags of Baltimore and Maryland flapped to the rear of the stage.

Some of the veterans of the city’s long football wars assembled: There were officials of the Maryland Stadium Authority, the agency formed in the wake of the Colts’ departure to procure another NFL team and to make sure that the baseball Orioles didn’t leave in the meantime. The authority’s executive director, Bruce Hoffman, an engineer who had overseen the construction of Oriole Park, sat in the front row. He would now be called upon to supervise the new football stadium. Maryland state Senators John Pica and Tommy Bromwell, who had helped to draft the eminentdomain legislation that spooked Colts’ owner Robert Irsay into leaving in 1984, were there, too. The two Baltimore-area lawmakers had fought for years to maintain funding for the stadium, beating back opponents’ arguments that there were better uses for the public money. That fight was about to get even uglier.

Another 100 or so uninvited guests positioned themselves to the side of the stage and pushed against yellow police barricades. They erupted in a boisterous chant of Art, Art, Art, when Modell’s dark limousine arrived in a five-car motorcade, escorted by motorcycle cops.

Many fans waved handmade signs. If you build it they will come, read one. Another, parodying a popular Budweiser TV commercial, said: Art Modell, We Love You Man. Still other signs expressed Baltimoreans’ resentment over NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue’s role in denying the city an expansion team: Tagliabue Can’t Stop Us Now.

Many Baltimore fans were jubilant. That morning, some had scoured local stores for Browns hats, sweaters and other gear. They crossed out Cleveland with magic markers or masking tape and replaced it with Baltimore. Bootleg Baltimore Browns T-shirts were already for sale.

The sky was a cloudless blue — Colts blue — and the temperature a crisp 55 degrees. It was sweatshirt and football weather in Baltimore, a city which had nurtured the NFL through its shaky adolescence and had never quite adjusted to autumn without the game.

Modell, seated between Glendening and Schmoke, remained stone-faced. This was the sort of occasion that he generally craved, one that thrust him to the center of attention and cast him as a hero. But Modell had been in public life long enough to know what this day actually meant. He had seen the vilification of owners who had moved their teams. He himself had been among the most critical when the Colts left Baltimore and Al Davis stunned Oakland by moving his Raiders.

He knew what was coming.

As he waited for his turn to speak, Modell scanned the crowd warily through his silver-rimmed bifocals. Sharing the dais with him, cheerfully talking, were some of the most important people in his life, including his son, David, who ran the Browns’ marketing operation and was widely assumed to be the owner in waiting, and his good friend Alfred Lerner, a billionaire Cleveland financier. Lerner, who began amassing his fortune as a $75-a-week furniture salesman in Baltimore, was a part-owner of the Browns. He had made the introductions that resulted in the team’s move to Baltimore.

Spotting a familiar face, Modell briefly smiled, got up and reached down to shake the outstretched hand of William Donald Schaefer, who had been mayor of Baltimore when the Colts left. During his two terms as Maryland’s governor, Schaefer had made the return of the NFL a personal crusade. But he had been banished this day to a seat in the audience, so as not to upstage his successor. Though both men were Democrats, Glendening’s slim election victory a year earlier had come with no help from Schaefer.

Cameras clicked and whirred as Schaefer and Modell shook hands. The two men went way back together. Modell had flirted with Baltimore for years, first hinting a decade ago that he might be interested in bringing a team to town. He and Schaefer held a number of secret meetings a year after the Colts left. They discussed a new stadium, possibly to be shared with the Orioles, and how Modell would sell the Browns, move to Baltimore and become its owner in waiting as he pursued an expansion franchise. The talks went on for several years, raising the hopes of city officials, but nothing ever came of them. Later, when the NFL added expansion franchises, Modell expressed support for the city’s application — except when it counted. During deliberations inside the NFL owners meetings, Modell helped to sink Baltimore’s application.

The crowd, recognizing the role the former governor had played in securing stadium funding and fighting the good fight, applauded warmly. Schaefer smiled and waved.

Maryland Stadium Authority chairman John Moag, Jr., who sold the Browns on Baltimore, stepped to the podium to begin the ceremony. Only the second chairman in the Authority’s nine-year existence, Moag had held the volunteer post for 11 months. He was off to a very good start.

Moag asked the crowd for a moment of silence for Yitzhak Rabin. The assassinated Israeli prime minister was being buried that day in Jerusalem.

Then Moag, a Baltimore-based Congressional lobbyist, turned to the happier business at hand. He introduced the people lined up behind him and acknowledged the many dignitaries in the audience. Clearly out of his element, Moag shifted from foot to foot and leaned awkwardly down to the microphone. A relative newcomer on the Maryland political stage, Moag had been a behind-the-scenes player for years and a hustler all of his life. From making a few bucks parking cars on his family’s lawn before Colts games, to greasing the skids of a client’s legislation as a Washington lobbyist, Moag had long known how to exploit an advantage. But most of his work was done, sometimes with a wink and a nudge, in Capitol Hill hallways and offices. He wasn’t used to the intense scrutiny and criticism that the Browns deal would draw.

He urged the crowd to show compassion for Cleveland fans who, he noted, were going through a wrenching process all too familiar to Baltimoreans.

Our elation is accompanied by pain that we know so well, Moag said.

He suggested that this should be a moment of pensive reflection for Baltimoreans. Then he introduced his boss, Governor Parris Glendening, who betrayed not a trace of pensiveness or reflection.

An ordinary and earnest speaker on his best days, Glendening delivered a graceless performance that would haunt him for months.

This is a great day for Baltimore. This is a great day for the state of Maryland. And, personally, this is a great day to be governor, he said to rousing cheers.

Glendening spoke of the great tradition of the Browns, seeming to miss the point that the team’s great tradition and its civic association made its theft all the more hurtful for Clevelanders and NFL fans. The move was, as Cleveland-born comic Martin Mull would quip later that day, like finding out the Eiffel Tower had been moved to Nebraska.

But Maryland’s newly elected governor was eager for a success during a year filled with missteps. He waved a Browns beer mug in the air and playfully taunted reporters. You just never asked the right question, Glendening teased.

I said I would never comment until we had a signed lease with an NFL team. You never asked me if we had a signed lease, he said, holding aloft the Browns’ memorandum of understanding with Maryland. The Browns are coming to Baltimore!

Moag and Glendening had convinced Modell that he needed to act quickly. If he delayed, they told him, he would lose out on the state’s generous offer of a publicly financed stadium leased on exceedingly favorable terms. The agreement had been secretly signed early on the morning of Oct. 27, aboard Lerner’s private plane at Baltimore-Washington International Airport. It was not supposed to be announced until after the 1995 football season, to avoid a plunge in Browns ticket sales and the spectacle of a lame-duck team playing before a hostile home crowd. But word leaked, and the announcement was pushed up a month.

Glendening pridefully compared the negotiations to Kissinger-style shuttle diplomacy — a comment that seemed all the more inappropriate in light of the Rabin funeral that day. But the governor clearly reveled in his deal making, in the hushed meetings and the secret knock on the airplane door.

I’m sure all of us involved will never forget the early morning calls, the late evening calls and the weekend visits. It was fun, no question about it,’ he gushed.

Even Modell cringed. A Baltimore Sun columnist later dubbed Glendening Governor Gloat-dening. Opponents of the move would replay a tape of his speech on TV sports talk shows, and in homes across the country as Baltimore, overnight, was transformed from sympathetic victim to greedy thief.

The reaction stunned Glendening. Where do these people think franchises come from? he would later ask, exasperated. A former political science professor at the University of Maryland, Glendening was a shrewd calculator of action and reaction. But he had miscalculated this one.

He thought he had pulled off the sort of political coup that a governor could only pray for. He had brought the National Football League back to Baltimore, filling a painful void. He had achieved in 11 months what Schaefer, a vastly more popular and passionate governor, had spent 11 fruitless years trying to accomplish. This should have been Glendening’s day to step out from Schaefer’s long shadow.

Here he was, just a few hundred feet away from two of Schaefer’s most enduring monuments: Oriole Park at Camden Yards and Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. The universally acclaimed retro ball park was partly responsible for a stadium building boom then underway across the nation. The Orioles had gone from a backwater franchise to one of the richest teams in professional sports, thus demonstrating to team owners the mesmerizing wealth that could be theirs with a new stadium. Even Modell had fallen under the spell.

And the success of the Inner Harbor, an upscale retail complex off to the east, had convinced countless other cities, including Cleveland, to reclaim their waterfronts and rejuvenate their downtowns. The Inner Harbor’s shops and restaurants had brought tourists and residents flocking to a once-shunned industrial district and revived the city’s self-image.

By putting the baseball and football parks in Camden Yards, Schaefer had managed to extend the reach of the Inner Harbor a few blocks west, connecting the waterfront with a working-class neighborhood. And, he hoped, that would keep up the momentum of the city’s development.

But in the coming weeks, the former governor would join the chorus of critics of the Browns deal, suggesting that he wouldn’t have done such a dastardly deed, that he wouldn’t have given away so much. Schaefer was just being opportunistic. During his time, he had offered similar, or better deals, to other NFL team owners. Today, however, Schaefer said he was pleased to see his dream realized — although he understood how Clevelanders felt. He, too, had experienced that awful kick in the stomach.

I feel sorry for the mayor of Cleveland, he said when the cameras converged on him, as they would several times during the one-hour ceremony.

A fan shouted to Schaefer, You were the quarterback. . . . They came in the fourth quarter.

Indeed, Schaefer had muscled the funding for the stadium through the Maryland General Assembly, but he had been unable, despite personal intervention with NFL owners, to close the deal.

Glendening paid only passing homage to Schaefer, crediting him with laying the groundwork for the day.

Don, we appreciate it, he said perfunctorily from the podium.

The new governor needed all of the credit he could get, and he hoped the day’s celebration would help put behind him the nagging questions of his election. His margin of victory had been a humiliating 5,993 votes despite the 2-to-1 registration advantage Democrats enjoy in Maryland over Republicans. He had carried only three of Maryland’s 24 jurisdictions. But they were the three biggest. One was Baltimore City.

As Glendening was soon to learn, times had changed since 1987 when Schaefer, running a state that foolishly considered itself recession proof, had converted his 82-percent election victory in ‘86 into legislative approval for two stadiums at Camden Yards. It was a half-billion-dollar chunk of pork that Schaefer had hoped would win back the affections of the NFL and keep the Orioles from leaving town.

But by 1995, a fiercely conservative Congress was slashing federal agencies — many of them staffed by Marylanders earning fat paychecks. This, and a continuing erosion of Maryland’s industrial base, had pushed the state into a malaise that lingered after the national economy had recovered. While negotiating a costly deal with the Browns, Glendening was reducing aid for the state’s disabled citizens and eliminating education programs for prisoners — causes dear to both Glendening and his lieutenant governor, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, a member of America’s first family of liberalism.

Several people in the audience raised the point with heckles and signs.

After Glendening introduced him, Modell moved slowly to the podium. Months of negotiations and soul-searching were now complete, and he was transplanting his treasured Browns, one of the most respected franchises in the NFL, to a new city and a new stadium. It had been an agonizing decision.

For years, Modell had watched lesser team owners such as the Raiders’ renegade Al Davis and the Colts’ boozy Bob Irsay boost their personal fortunes with team moves. In the past year alone, three team owners had announced or completed lucrative moves to new addresses: the Los Angeles Rams’ Georgia Frontiere, the Houston Oilers’ Bud Adams, and, again, Davis, who was returning to the city he had once fought the league for the right to abandon. Even Malcolm Glazer, owner of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for less than a year, was shopping around for a new home. And Ken Behring of the Seattle Seahawks was looking to move his team to Los Angeles.

Modell had opposed all of these moves, and had forcefully warned his fellow owners that such instability squandered the fan loyalty that he and the other old guard league men had spent years building.

But now he was joining the gold rush. And he was getting one of the best claims of all: A stadium whose every square foot was designed to make him money. Maryland would spend $200 million building a luxury stadium with skyboxes, club seats, high-tech scoreboards and anything else anyone could think of. All Modell had to pay was the cost of running the facility. He would even be allowed to book concerts and other events there and split the proceeds with the state.

The deal would lift Modell out from under crushing debt. Years of questionable business deals and free-agent signings had cost him dearly and failed to deliver what he most wanted: a Super Bowl trophy. Meanwhile, the league’s economics were fast shifting against owners such as him who were confined to old stadiums. Merely filling the seats — something the league mastered years before — was no longer enough to ensure success for a team. Now the owners were boosting profits by systematically driving up the value of ticket sales by driving up the price. The best way to do that: sell them to corporations that were willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a season for climate-controlled suites in which they could romance clients and strike deals. Of course, old wrecks such as Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium, as historic as they were, would never do for the cellular phone set.

Modell was slow to recognize this change and even slower to act. He had mastered his sport in the era when season tickets were sold one by one through personal appearances over rubbery chicken at Rotary Club luncheons. No one did it better than Modell. He was funny. He was charming. And he was hard to refuse when he came around with a pocketful of tickets and promises for a winning season. But now teams like the Carolina Panthers and Jacksonville Jaguars, new franchises playing in new or like-new stadiums, were generating more cash from each of their skyboxes than Modell could wring from 1,000 season tickets. And they were a threat on the field. Suddenly Modell’s shtick was obsolete.

Also outdated was his approach to local politics. At one time, Modell moved easily along the corridors of power. He had bankrolled candidates, especially Republican ones. He was generous with charities. He served on the right boards and political committees, staying in touch with the powerful men who got things done. He could pick up the phone and quickly reach a mayor, governor or even the President. For decades this gave him and his franchise everything they needed. When he decided he ought to run the city-owned stadium himself, he worked adroitly to get it accomplished.

But the characters and rules had all changed over the past 10 years. Unfamiliar faces were in charge back at Cleveland’s City Hall. Modell was no longer a master of his own fate. He had tried to play by the old rules to get a new stadium, and he had failed miserably. He backed a loser for mayor. He worked clumsily behind the scenes, confusing even his supporters about what he needed or wanted. He wanted the community to repay him for his years of service, but he didn’t want to beg. He took it as a point of pride that he never threatened to move the team. But threatening to move was how Stadium Wars were being fought and won in the 1990s.

Modell, relying on the winks and good will that had served him well in previous decades, had let civic leaders push him to the end of a line he should have headed. They were more worried about losing the Indians. The hapless Tribe had, after all, threatened to change cities almost as many times as it had changed managers. And the franchise’s new owner, Dick Jacobs, was precisely the sort of hard-nosed millionaire who could move a team. He had even brought in baseball’s commissioner to underscore the threat: build a new stadium or lose the team. Though a Cleveland resident, Jacobs was largely a mystery to most of the city, rarely involving himself in the usual civic functions and boards.

Not Modell. He was a stalwart community man and notoriously soft touch. He could never break the heart of his adopted home town. He was, after all, from Brooklyn and vividly recalled the pain of the Dodgers move west — the first truly shocking franchise relocation of the modern era. When Modell promised, as he often did, never to move the Browns, city leaders believed him. He even kept his demands low, insisting a renovation — rather than a new building — would suffice. The Browns leave Cleveland? That would be like the Bears jilting Chicago or the Giants deserting New York.

Or the Colts leaving Baltimore.

For Jacobs, who had no reservations about threatening to move his team, Cleveland had constructed a Camden Yards-class facility. Same for the NBA Cavaliers. In fact, the city was on a veritable spending spree, putting up a multimillion dollar hall of fame for rock ‘n’ roll musicians, a new science center and associated public works projects. And, as Modell learned the hard way, the money was fast running out.

More than anything else, the new stadiums in Cleveland demonstrated to Modell what could be done in a new venue. The Indians, a perennial doormat of the American League, and were Modell’s rent-paying subtenants at Municipal Stadium, took in so much at their highly acclaimed Jacobs Field that they could afford to shop aggressively in the free agent market. The team made it that season to their first World Series in 41 years. They, not the Browns, were now the talk of Cleveland. Long-time corporate customers were cancelling their skyboxes at Municipal Stadium and signing up at the Jake.

And Modell, as he liked to say, was still trying to get indoor plumbing.

He was exaggerating, of course. Municipal was old and decrepit, but it had primitive skyboxes and some amenities many other teams lacked. By some accounts, he was earning more in revenue from his stadium than most other NFL teams. But it was both falling down and falling behind the times. Upkeep was gobbling up his profits. Modell had borrowed all he could the year before to sign free agents and still fell a game shy of going to the Super Bowl. In 1995, the team was off to a lackluster start. His health was poor. The banks were wary of letting him pile on more debt. He needed to act fast if he was going to get to the big show.

Even Cleveland officials acknowledged that their stadium renovation plan was worth a fraction of what Baltimore was offering. Cleveland had cobbled together a complicated, $170 million package of loans, up front payments from businesses, and taxes on cigarettes, booze and parking to rebuild 64-year-old Municipal Stadium from the ground up. A voters’ referendum on one part of the funding was scheduled for the next day, Nov. 7. But Modell, who was routinely being savaged in the Cleveland press for everything from bad player trades to bad punts, didn’t think it would pass and wasn’t convinced it would be enough if it did.

Meanwhile, Maryland had been ready for eight years with legislation that permitted it to build a stadium financed by the proceeds from a special sports-theme instant lottery. This same sort of mechanism had built Oriole Park. The land for the football palace had been bought and cleared. All that was needed was a signature on a lease — which Modell had provided — and the bonds would be sold and the bulldozers rolled out. Or so Maryland officials said.

Stadiums had become a key factor of NFL economics. Moving to a new stadium would catapult Modell’s franchise overnight to among the most valuable in sports, easily adding $75 million to $100 million to its worth. It was a windfall unimaginable to Modell, a high school dropout who had borrowed everything he could 34 years earlier to buy the Browns for $3.9 million.

The Maryland deal even included a provision that allowed Modell to raise $80 million through permanent seat licenses, a pernicious trend then sweeping sports. A PSL was a one-time fee that gave a fan the right and obligation to purchase a season ticket each year. It typically ranged from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand.

Modell thought Cleveland, with its thousands of longtime season ticket holders, would never go for PSLs, at least not in an old stadium. But the Maryland deal allowed Modell to immediately go out and obtain a $50 million loan backed by the expected proceeds of the license sales. It was a much-needed infusion of cash.

So it was more than professional courtesy that prompted Modell to introduce his new banker, Frank Bramble, to the Baltimore audience. Bramble, then in charge of Maryland National Bank, was a Lerner protogé who had worked with him to rescue and then sell the state’s largest bank. Bramble arranged Modell’s $50 million line of credit and was happy to stand and take a bow when introduced.

Modell knew that deserting Cleveland would cost him. He would lose much of what he held dear, especially his stature in Cleveland, where he had once been so popular his name had been mentioned as a candidate for high office.

Decades of friendships and familiar routines would now be broken. His cherished mansion in the Cleveland suburbs, where he and his wife, the former actress Patricia Breslin, had entertained the stars of Hollywood and Republican politics, and where Pat’s two children, David, and John, had grown up as Art’s adopted sons, would have to be sold.

His revered position within the NFL, a fraternity of vast wealth and celebrity, would also be shaken. His place in the Pro Football Hall of Fame — he had been nominated for the class of 1996 — was in jeopardy. And he would no longer be able to go out in public without a bodyguard for fear that a zealous Browns fan would carry out one of the death threats already pouring in by fax, phone and letter.

This has been a very tough road for my family and me, Modell sadly told the Baltimore crowd.

I leave my home of 35 years and a good part of my heart there. I can never forget the kindness of the people of Cleveland.

Modell managed a few one-liners, but for the most part his remarks were forced and defensive. He looked down often, speaking softly.

I know what you went through 11 years ago because that is exactly what is happening in Cleveland right now, Modell said.

I am deeply, deeply sorry from the bottom of my heart.

Looking over the heads of the Cleveland sportswriters whose favor he had courted over the years, Modell spoke flatly of his pleasure at being in Baltimore. He recalled the great Browns-Colts games of the 1950s and 1960s, when the two teams were perennial contenders for championships and strong-armed quarterbacks like Otto Graham and Johnny Unitas were at the helm.

The Colts and Browns were founded just a year apart, in a short-lived league born in the post-World War II sports boom. In their prime, they were among the most respected franchises, winning hearts and championships in an age when the grass was real and face masks were a novelty. The earth shook when the two teams met at riotous Memorial Stadium or cavernous Municipal Stadium. Titles were often on the line, and the outcomes were never assured.

Football may have made its millions in the glamorous media capitals of New York and Los Angeles, but it first connected with fans in working-class cities like Cleveland and Baltimore. It was in industrial centers, among the smokestacks and the steamships, that the National Football League built its following, game by game, often played in stadiums built for baseball.

It hardly seemed likely that storied, old-guard franchises like the Browns or the Colts would ever forsake their longtime fans, whose adoration knew no bounds.

If there were any doubt about how the public would react to the Browns’ move, an unidentified messenger in the parking lot that afternoon settled it. Standing silently behind the police barricades, among the revelers, the man held a one-word sign above his head: $hame.

During a brief question-and-answer period, reporters shot